The following correction was printed in the Guardian's Corrections and clarifications column, Saturday July 23 2005

At the end of this article, we identified the author Dilpazier Aslam as a Guardian trainee journalist but did not say that he was a member of the political party Hizb ut-Tahrir. The Guardian accepts that Mr Aslam's membership of the party should have been explicitly mentioned. A statement by the Guardian has already appeared in the paper, with a fuller account on the
Guardian website.

If I'm asked about 7/7, I - a Yorkshire lad, born and bred - will respond first by giving an out-clause to being labelled a terrorist lover. I think what happened in London was a sad day and not the way to express your political anger.

Then there's the "but". If, as police announced yesterday, four men (at least three from Yorkshire) blew themselves up in the name of Islam, then please let us do ourselves a favour and not act shocked.

Shocked would be to imply that we were unaware of the imminent danger, when in fact Sir John Stevens, the then Metropolitan police commissioner, warned us last year that an attack was inevitable.

Shocked would be to suggest we didn't appreciate that when Falluja was flattened, the people under it were dead but not forgotten - long after we had moved on to reading more interesting headlines about the Olympics. It is not the done thing to make such comparisons, but Muslims on the street do. Some 2,749 people were killed in the 9/11 attacks. To discover the cost of "liberating" Iraqis you need to multiply that figure by eight, and still you will fall short of the estimated minimum of 22,787 civilian Iraqi casualties to date. But it's not cool to say this, now that London's skyline has also has plumed grey.

Shocked would also be to suggest that the bombings happened through no responsibility of our own. OK, the streets of London were filled with anti-war marchers, so why punish the average Londoner? But the argument that this was an essentially US-led war does not pass muster. In the Muslim world, the pond that divides Britain and America is a shallow one. And the same cry - why punish us? - is often heard from Iraqi mothers as the "collateral damage" increases daily.

Shocked would be to say that we don't understand how, in the green hills of Yorkshire, a group of men given all the liberties they could have wished for could do this.

The Muslim community is no monolithic whole. Yet there are some common features. Second- and third-generation Muslims are without the don't-rock-the-boat attitude that restricted our forefathers. We're much sassier with our opinions, not caring if the boat rocks or not.

Which is why the young get angry with that breed of Muslim "community leader" who remains silent while anger is seething on the streets.

Earlier this year I attended a mosque in Leeds for Friday prayers. It was in the month of Ramadan, when Islamic fervour is at its most impassioned, yet in the sermon, to a crowd of hundreds - many of whom were from Iraq - Falluja was not referred to once; not even in the cupped-hands prayers after the sermon was over.

I prayed my Eid prayer in a mosque in Sheffield and, though most there were sickened and angry about events in Iraq, the imam chose not to mention Falluja either. We "youngsters" - some now in our 40s - had seen it before. This was deliberate silence, in case the boat rocked.

Perhaps now is the time to be honest with each other and to stop labelling the enemy with simplistic terms such as "young", "underprivileged", "undereducated" and perhaps even "fringe". The don't-rock-the-boat attitude of elders doesn't mean the agitation wanes; it means it builds till it can be contained no more.